Oct 30 (Reuters) – Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike, in her first statement after she survived a botched execution a month ago, said she was in constant physical and mental pain and largely isolated from other people in a prison hospital ward.
Pike is being held in the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, the Tennessee prison where she has been housed for over 30 years after her conviction for a 1995 murder.
In a statement released on Friday by her lawyers, to whom she dictated it, she said she continued to think about her victim’s family and the “terrible pain and loss they have endured.”
She said her isolation was causing mental pain by reminding her of the 28 years she spent in solitary confinement.
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” Pike said.
Pike, 50, was taken from the execution chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to a Nashville hospital, unconscious, critically ill and with severe arm injuries after two injections failed to kill her on September 30. She was released from the hospital and sent to the Johnson center on October 10, days after her lawyers said she had regained consciousness and was speaking.
In her statement, she thanked the first responders, doctors and nurses who cared for her after the attempted execution.
Pike said she did not know why she survived the execution, nor what would happen to her next.
She said the love and support she has received from people around the world has given her strength.
“To know that so many people care about me, that they see me as a human being whose life matters, is something I cannot fully put into words,” Pike said.
A Tennessee judge has ordered state officials to preserve all evidence related to their failed attempt to execute her, a development one of her lawyers called the “first of many steps to preserve and enforce her constitutional rights.” Her lawyers have called the botched attempt a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions for the rest of the year while investigators look into the botched execution of Pike and a similar failure in May involving another inmate.
Lee, who denied Pike’s clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison two days before the execution attempt, told reporters earlier this week that he expected her sentence would remain unchanged “unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
Pike would have been the first woman Tennessee put to death since the early 19th century. While botched lethal injections are not rare, she is the first person known to have survived a “completed execution attempt” in the US, her lawyers say.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third companion lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate in Knoxville, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her. Pike and Shipp were convicted of first-degree murder. Shipp, whose age at the time made him ineligible for the death penalty, received a life sentence and remains in prison. The third person involved testified against Pike and Shipp as part of a plea deal and received probation.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; additional reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; editing by Donna Bryson and Nia Williams)
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